Many TechRepublic readers have followed my difficulties with audio in Linux. For
the longest time, PulseAudio was a tragedy to work with (on certain hardware — my production recording studio machine being one of them). Things were starting
to steer me toward making the leap to OS X, if only for just audio production, but then things took a turn for the slightly improved. What happened? I
upgraded to Ubuntu 13.10.

The improvements for audio productions are marked, especially
recording. I no longer experience random stops in the input stream, so I don't have to punch sections to fix sound loss. I still
notice skipping during playback, which isn't a deal breaker as much as it is an
annoyance. However, as with everything, I have a plan.

Solid state drive

That's right, I'm going to migrate my machine into modern
times and use a solid state drive (SSD). Why? The drastic performance gain with these
devices should, at least in theory, fix the last issue I have with Linux and
audio.

But wait! Isn't Linux rumored to not be ready for
prime time SSD usage? At one point, that was the case... but actually, it was
more the hardware not truly being ready for prime time. Every platform had to
deal with write aheads causing fast degradation of the hardware. However, there was
a recent article on StorageSearch
that went into great detail on why you shouldn't worry about the lifespan of an
SSD. Effectively, they ran tests that concluded, even when an SSD receives
writes at a continuous rate of 80M/s, the life span of said drive is 51 years. Those tests were based on 2007 SSD firmware. Things have changed quite a
lot since then.

That doesn't mean that you should just throw a Linux
distribution on an SSD and be done with it. In fact, there's at least one
optimization that should be done before you "set it and forget it." That
optimization is TRIM, which effectively tells an operating system which blocks of
data on an SSD are no longer considered in use and should be wiped
internally.

You can either configure Linux to handle TRIM automatically or you
can run the TRIM command manually. I highly recommend setting this up to be
automated. Here's how you do it:

From the output of the
hdparm command, copy the number under the begin_LBA section

Verify the device name of
your SSD (sda, sdb, sdg, etc)

Issue the command: sudo
hdparm —read-sector [ADDRESS] /dev/sdX (where ADDRESS is the number you copied
from the begin_LBA section and sdX is the SSD device name)

Remove the tempfile
created from the output of the sudo hdparm —fibmap tempfile command

Issue the command: sync

Repeat the hdparm command from above

At this point, the output of the
hdparm command should be nothing but zeroes. If that's the case, automatic TRIM
is working. If you do not get only zeroes, give the system an hour or so and
rerun the hdparm command. Hopefully, at that point, you should only see zeroes.
This method of testing isn't flawless, because sometimes the TRIM does
take longer.

Congratulations, your Linux
operating system should be optimized for your SSD. Of course, not everything is created equal or
perfect. Everyone will find varying results with Linux and SSDs, but the
performance increase you receive with these devices is so significant that the
trouble you might have to go through is well worth the time involved.

Most importantly, as
always, back up your data! It doesn't matter if you are using an HDD, SDD, or
some newer drive based on Cylon technology — be sure to back up your data!

Have you optimized your Linux operating system for SSD? Share your experience in the discussion thread below.

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About Jack Wallen

Jack Wallen is an award-winning writer for TechRepublic and Linux.com. He’s an avid promoter of open source and the voice of The Android Expert. For more news about Jack Wallen, visit his website getjackd.net.

Full Bio

Jack Wallen is an award-winning writer for TechRepublic and Linux.com. He’s an avid promoter of open source and the voice of The Android Expert. For more news about Jack Wallen, visit his website getjackd.net.